Americanity and the Prospects of a Hemispheric Social Imaginary

Bibliographic Data

ID3638656
AuthorsFuyuki Kurasawa (0000-0003-0387-5227, York University, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume29
Issue4
Pages347-361
Publication date2008-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Intercultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0725-6868 • E-ISSN: 1469-9540
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/07256860802372238
OpenAlexW2006530250
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited31

This paper employs the concept of americanity, as outlined in French-language writings over the past few decades, as a point of entry to outline the theoretical foundations of a transcultural hemispheric social imaginary in the Americas. The paper begins with a brief intellectual history of americanity's usage in francophone Québécois scholarship, after which it turns to a consideration of how the term can assist an interculturally based reading of modern society in the Americas and beyond. The final section examines the socio-political implications of using the idea of americanity, which builds upon the insights of the Canadian School of political theory regarding civic life in multicultural settings. In particular, I contend that americanity enables us to conceive of an agonistic and pluralistic understanding of the public sphere, whereby the latter is open to contestation by socio-cultural groups and the recognition of their demands in a manner that thickens democratic practices. Keywords: AmericanityAmericasPluralismPublic SphereSocial Imaginary Acknowledgements Research and writing were made possible by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would like to thank Neil Gross, Gerald Kernerman, Michèle Lamont and Natalie Melas for their advice and support, participants in the Culture and Social Analysis Workshop and Michèle Lamont's working group (both at Harvard University) for their feedback, and Jean-François Côté for his intellectual generosity. Matthew Hayes and Mervyn Horgan provided outstanding research assistance. The usual disclaimer applies. Notes 1. I want to thank Natalie Melas for drawing my attention to Glissant's Le Discours antillais and its similarities to the argument advanced here. While it goes beyond the scope of this paper, a comparison between antillanité, créolité and américanité would be extremely fruitful, in a manner already laid out by certain thinkers: “La Créolité englobe et parachève donc l'Américanité puisqu'elle implique le double processus: d'adaptation des Européens, des Africains et des Asiatiques au Nouveau Monde; de confrontation culturelle entre ces peuples au sein d'un même espace, aboutissant à la création d'une culture syncrétique dite créole” (Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant 31). 2. Although an analysis of the Latin American contributions to this hemispheric imaginary is well beyond the scope and intent of this paper, it should be mentioned that the notion of americanity finds its roots in pioneering essays such as José Martí's “Nuestra América” (“Our America”, first published in 1892) and José Vasconcelos Vasconcelos, José. 1997. The Cosmic Race/La raza cósmica, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. [Google Scholar]’ La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race, first published in 1925). For more recent Latin American writings on the concept, see, inter alia: Marinho, de Campos and de Souza; Mignolo; Ortíz; as well as the journal Nuevo Mundo . Despite these, as well as the works of other authors writing in English (Csipak Csipak , James , and Lise Héroux . “ Nationalism, Liberalism and the Américanité of Quebecers: From Fear to Embrace? ” L'américanité et les Amériques . Donald Cuccioletta . Québec City, QC : Presses de l'Université Laval , 2001 . 103 – 36 . [Google Scholar] and Héroux; Cuccioletta Cuccioletta , Donald , Jean-François Côté , and Frédéric Lesemann . Le Grand récit des Amériques: Polyphonie des identités culturelles dans le contexte de la continentalisation . Québec City, QC : Presses de l'Université Laval , 2001 . [Google Scholar], Côté and Lesemann; Dupont Dupont, Louis. 1995. “L'Américanité in Quebec in the 1980s: Political and Cultural Considerations of an Emerging Discourse.”. American Review of Canadian Studies, 25.1: 27–52. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]; Quijano Quijano, Aníbal and Immanuel, Wallerstein. 1992. “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System.”. International Social Science Journal, 44.4: 549–57. [Google Scholar] and Wallerstein), the notion of americanity remains relatively obscure in the English-speaking world. 3. The concept of the social imaginary originates in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge: Polity. [Google Scholar], referring to a symbolically mediated system of significations that is collectively instituted and shared. For Castoriadis, the social imaginary is the source of society self-creation in the socio-historical field or, put differently, of what he terms the instituting society (Castoriadis Castoriadis , Cornelius . World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination . David Ames Curtis . Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press , 1997 . [Google Scholar] The Imaginary Institution of Society 146; World in Fragments 8, 13). More recently, the social imaginary has been given wider currency by Charles Taylor, who understands it to mean the common ways that ordinary persons imagine the social world, including intersubjective, narrative and normative dimensions of existence (Taylor Modern Social Imaginaries 23–25). 4. Many of the leading francophone Québécois historians, sociologists, political scientists and literary scholars have participated in this debate (Bouchard Bouchard, Gérard and Michel, Lacombe. 1999. Dialogue sur les pays neufs, Montréal: Boréal. [Google Scholar] Genèse des nations et cultures du nouveau monde; Fournier Fournier, Marcel. 1984. “Éditorial.”. Possibles, 8.4: 5–8. [Google Scholar]; Lamonde Allégeances et dépendances; Létourneau; Rocher; Thériault Thériault, Joseph Yvon. 2002. Critique de l'américanité: Mémoire et démocratie au Québec, Montréal: Québec Amérique. [Google Scholar]), as have some of the province's key French-language journals (Possibles, Argument, Recherches sociographiques, Sociologies et sociétés, Politique et société, etc.). The Groupe interdisciplinaire de recherche sur les Amériques (GIRA) is an active research network on the topic. See (accessed 15 February 2008). 5. For instance, Lamonde playfully advances the following ‘formula’ to represent the various historical components of Québec identity: Q = − (F)+(GB)+(USA)2 − (R)+(C), where F is France, GB is Great Britain, R is Rome (or the Roman Catholic Church) and C is Canada. For an elaboration, see Lamonde Lamonde , Yvan . Allégeances et dépendances: L'histoire d'une ambivalence identitaire . Québec City, QC : Nota bene , 2001 . [Google Scholar] Allégeances et dépendances; Histoire sociale des idées au Québec. 6. Americanity's rejection of an exclusively European-based national collective memory does not entail the latter's erasure or the death knell of the distinctiveness of the francophone project on the continent (Thériault Thériault, Joseph Yvon. 2002. Critique de l'américanité: Mémoire et démocratie au Québec, Montréal: Québec Amérique. [Google Scholar]). Rather, it recognises that collective memory is contested and multiple, with one of the key questions being whose history is preserved and whose is forgotten. Thus, the task consists of combining the mnemonic imaginaries of, say, indigenous peoples and black Canadians to that of French-Canadians in Québec. 7. The identification of a Canadian School of political theory stems from many sources (Beiner Beiner , Ronald , and Wayne Norman . Canadian Political Philosophy: Contemporary Reflections . Toronto : Oxford University Press , 2001 . [Google Scholar] and Norman; Kernerman). While bound together by an overarching progressive liberalism, this School contains a variety of approaches that range from Taylor Taylor , Charles . Modern Social Imaginaries . Durham, NC : Duke University Press , 2004 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]'s Hegelian emphasis on recognition to Chambers's Habermasian interpretation of deliberation, and from Tully's Wittgensteinian notion of the ‘aspectival’ character of cultural diversity to Kymlicka's theory of accommodation of minority group rights. 8. To this extent, my perspective differs from those of many other theorists of agonistic politics, such as Connolly's neo-Nietzscheanism and Mouffe's neo-Schmittian approach (Connolly Connolly, William E. 2005. Pluralism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Mouffe Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox, London and New York: Verso. [Google Scholar]). Like them, however, I want to maintain the crucial distinction between agonistic adversaries (based on the analogy of a contest between protagonists bound by ties of mutual respect) and antagonistic enemies (based on the analogy of warfare and destruction of protagonists). Additional informationNotes on contributorsFuyuki KurasawaFuyuki Kurasawa is Associate Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, and Co-President of the International Sociological Association's Research Committee on Sociological Theory. He has been a Fulbright and Commonwealth Scholar, as well as a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Harvard University, New York University and Yale University. Kurasawa is the author of The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity (Minnesota, 2004) and of The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices (Cambridge, 2007)

Democracy · Epistemology · Multiculturalism · Pedagogy · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · The Imaginary · Canadian Identity and History · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · Cultural Studies and Colonialism · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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